COMMUNICATIONS RESEARCH COLLOQUIUM

AND INFORMAL SEMINAR

and

ECE COLLOQUIM

Speaker: Balaji Prabhakar
Affiliation: Stanford University
Date: Tuesday, October 21, 2003 
Time: 4:30-5:30pm 
Place: 101 Phillips 
Title: SIMPLE, SCALEABLE NETWORK ALGORITHMS

Abstract:

Randomized algorithms are particularly well-suited for coping with the so-called "curse of dimensionality" from which many networking problems suffer. The main idea of randomized algoriths is simple to state: Rather than contend with a large state space, the trick is to make decisions based upon a few randomly chosen samples.

This talk will illustrate the use of randomization in devising simple-to-impelement, high-performance network algorithms; specifically, for switch scheduling, web caching, and bandwidth partitioning.

Bio: Balaji Prabhakar is with the Departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Stanford University. He is currently interested in network algorithms, scalable network performance prediction, wireless networks and information theory. He is a Fellow of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and has received the NSF CAREER award, the Erlang Prize from the INFORMS Applied Probability Society, and the Rollo Davidson Prize from the University of Cambridge.